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Camille Turner: Hometown Queen
by Earl Miller
Numerous visitors, not to mention a handsome Black Mountie, posed with her. Turner reflects on how this tour “blurs the line between “reality” and fiction.”2 Her placing of “reality” in quotes implies her suspicion that “normative beauty” is not and should not be deemed reality. Her persona surreptitiously and hilariously subverts how we define reality by inserting an alternative fiction into real social events.
The Hamilton stop was just one on a worldwide tour that has taken Miss Canadiana to cities not only in Canada but also in Mexico, Australia, UK, Germany, Cuba, Jamaica, and Senegal. Still, Hamilton is a significant one as it is Turner’s hometown. That Hamilton helps define her work is made explicit in a series of six staged photographs of Miss Canadiana titled Hometown Queen, in which she is photoshopped to pose in front of the iconic former Stelco steel plant and its nearby neighbourhoods. Turner printed this backdrop in sepia tones that connote nostalgia. The series was included in a 2010 group show titled (Re)Visions that Sally Frater curated at Centre3 for Print and Media Arts in Hamilton as one of a series of exhibitions there exploring “(mis)representation and identity.”3 The photos – with a smiling, welcoming Miss Canadiana – evince a gentle irony as a result of her conflicting feelings concerning Hamilton. She explains: “The Hamilton I grew up in was a proud, hard-working steel town with a no-nonsense attitude. On the one hand I admire this city’s fierce resistance to the influence of nearby sprawling, full-of-itself Toronto. On the other hand, growing up there I witnessed and experienced many incidents of bigotry.”4 Turner uses performance to explore the conflicting way of how home relates to one’s identity as a Black Canadian.
The Miss Canadiana persona naturally examines the artist’s connection to Canada simultaneously to her connection to her hometown. Indeed, she stresses, “I use my image as Miss Canadiana to point to the contradiction of Canadian mythology. My body, as a representative of Canadian heritage, is surprising only because Blackness is perceived as foreign in Canada.”5 She stresses that being alienated from one’s home and attempting to rectify it by “interrogating home and belonging is the core of what [she does].”6
2 Turner.
3 (Re)Visions. (Hamilton: Centre3 for Print and Media Arts, 2012).
4 Camille Turner, 30 April 2014 [camilleturner.com].
5 Camille Turner.
6 Camille Turner, Personal interview, 24 March 2015.
[Distillate © HA&L + Earl Miller {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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